Matt Pond's love letter to Orlando

Preview

Although singer-songwriter Matt Pond lives in New York, the indie-pop fixture has become an enthusiastic ambassador for the charms of Orlando's independent music scene.

In February, a touring band that included Orlando musicians Tierney Tough (The Pauses), Ranson Vorpahl (Saskatchewan) and Tre Hester (Great Deceivers) accompanied Pond at a musical appearance on NBC's "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon." The same lineup will join Pond when his tour stops Thursday, July 11 at The Social in Orlando.

Now, a new music video for "Hole in My Heart," a track off Pond's "The Lives Inside the Lines in Your Hand" album, offers a stylish tribute to a few of Orlando's beloved homegrown pop-culture landmarks. Pond learned to love them after spending time in town in late 2012.

Produced by Jason Kupfer, the video frames Pond's stately, melodic song against a backdrop of a night-time bicycle ride through the Audubon Park Garden District and Mills 50 neighborhood.

In the video, Pond and the members of his band — Tough, Vorpahl, Hester and New York-based Chris Hansen — also hang out at Will's Pub, Redlight Redlight, The Falcon and other spots.

"Matt was spending a lot of time in Florida and in Orlando, specifically," says Kupfer, also a member of The Pauses. "He had contacted me about the idea of biking around the city and stopping at a lot of the local landmarks. We just sort of jumped into it very quickly."

Although additional lighting was required at the bars, Kupfer worked hard to keep production interference to a minimum.

"The challenge was to really capture the essence of Orlando naturally and genuinely without it becoming a commercial for Orlando night life," he says. "We put a lot of thought about creating sort of a love letter to the city and which locations would lend to the aesthetic and fit the tone of the song."

Two of the video's most distinctive scenes — a tumble that Pond took off his bicycle and a personable puppy at play in one of the bar scenes — both happened spontaneously.

"About 90 percent of the stuff the band is doing is just them naturally hanging out," Kupfer says. "A lot of people are thinking that the fall off the bike was staged because we filmed it from multiple angles, but we were doing that with everything. We thought that [the fall] was the end of the shoot. I thought we were going to hospital."

Although the musicians are laughing, pedaling along the rainy cobblestone streets in neighborhoods around Winter Park Road was challenging, Tough says.

"My glasses were covered in water and fog," she says. "I was behind them when he fell and I'm thinking, 'Where am I going? What's going to happen?' But it made movie magic and Matt's OK."

On the road, Pond and the local musicians are building on chemistry developed when he started to check out the Orlando music scene while living in St. Augustine in late 2012. Tour rehearsals are a combination of Skype sessions followed by fine-tuning in Orlando.

"I think he's pretty stoked on the band," Tough says. "We're all really excited to play with him and maybe he hasn't had that for a while."

The Pauses will open Pond's show at the Social, one of the last chances to see the band before it starts work on a studio album slated for release next year.

Unless you catch them bicycling to a favorite watering hole.

Matt Pond

What: in concert, with opening acts Matrimony and The Pauses

When: 8 p.m. Thursday, July 11

Where: The Social, 54 N. Orange Ave., Orlando

Cost: $12

Call: 407-246-1419

Online: thesocial.org

Tangled up in Bob

There's one line that hits me hard at a Bob Dylan show, just the way it did on June 27 in Tampa:

"But me I'm still on the road, heading for another joint," Dylan sang in "Tangled Up in Blue." It's truer now than it was when Dylan released the song in the mid-1970s, with the legendary singer still on the "Never-Ending Tour." That trek has continued, more or less without breaks, since it started in June 1988.

I've seen Dylan plenty of times. Never met him.

So I confess that when Dylan's two tour buses pulled out the back exit of the Florida State Fair Grounds last week, one car-length ahead of me, I was ready to follow the band into the nearby Seminole Hard Rock Hotel.

But the buses kept rolling, to Interstate 4 and I-75, heading for another joint.